Liberal Arts Services

Jill Anderson wins PEO Scholar Award for 2008-09

Jill Anderson

Posted: August 16, 2008

English Ph.D. candidate Jill Anderson will receive a P.E.O. Scholar
Award for the 2008-2009 academic year. The P.E.O. (Philanthropic
Educational Organization) established the P.E.O. Scholar Awards in 1991 to
provide substantial merit-based awards for women of the United States
and Canada who are either pursuing a doctoral level degree or engaged
in postgraduate study or research at an accredited college or
university.

Jill
is writing her dissertation, entitled "Re-Reading the American
Renaissance in New England and in Mexico City," in Mexico City. Her
project revisits the history of literary nationalisms in the US and
Mexico during the nineteenth century in order to render more visible
the bi-national cultural relations between the two countries and to
re-read their national project(ion)s in conversation. She re-reads
William Cullen Bryant and Guillermo Prieto, Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Ignacio Ramirez, and Henry David Thoreau and Mariano Otero in
conversation to demonstrate the coeval textual concerns that illuminate
the paradoxical mix of cooperation and conflict across the US-Mexico
border. Finally, she turns to a fellow re-reader, Maria Cristina Mena,
the first Mexican-born woman to publish short stories in English in the
United States, to learn from her literary synthesis of the US and
Mexican cultural legacies of the nineteenth century. Jill chose to live
and work in Mexico City so that the local and national realities of
present day Mexico might inform her scholarship. It has been an
exercise in avoiding abstractions in favor of relationships, and it has
been both fruitful and challenging. She is currently studying with
professors at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) and
volunteering at the Casa de los Amigos Peace Center and Guesthouse
where she lives with several friends and her family.